Elon Musk Sues Open AI Over Switch to For-Profit

Tonight, tech giants at War, billionaire Elon Musk taking on OpenAI, complaining the non-profit he helped fund is now a for-profit entity with ties to Microsoft.

Suddenly it’s a $90 billion for-profit corporation with closed doors. I don’t know how you go from fair to there, but that seems like a… I don’t know. Is this legal?

Musk is now suing the company and its founders, alleging in part that its entire development is veiled in secrecy.

It should be renamed Super Closed Doors For Maximum Profit AI, because this is what it actually is.

I think Musk does things because he’s got a pretty strong passion for what he feels has to be done on AI.

Walter Isaacson penned Elon Musk’s official biography. He says the billionaire has long been concerned about big tech dominance in the AI space.

He was worried that two big companies, Google and Microsoft, might someday control AI, so he and Sam Altman started OpenAI. What Musk wanted was it for it to be open, open source, and non-profit, and that was what they decided.

Just let me know what you need help with.

We took to ChatGPT, an OpenAI product, to see what it had to say. In one word, is OpenAI open?

In one word, I would say partially.

Partially how?

OpenAI operates with a mix of openness and proprietary practices. While it releases some research and models to the public, it also retains certain technologies and capabilities for commercial purposes.

Now OpenAI is moving to dismiss Elon’s claims, releasing emails that allegedly showed the tech founder agreed that parts of the company’s science could be closed. At one point in 2018, Elon reportedly suggested a merger with Tesla to stay competitive. “We may wish it otherwise, but Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google.”

The law is pretty unclear in the sense of can you sue a non-profit for becoming a for-profit? But as Musk said, “Hey, wait a minute. If this can happen, anybody can do it.”

All right, with that, Elwyn Lopez joins us tonight from Los Angeles. So Elwyn, first up, what is OpenAI and Sam Altman saying tonight?

Tom, OpenAI is adamant that its mission is to ensure that AGI, artificial general intelligence, benefits all of humanity. And they said that they’ve continued to stay dedicated to that every step of the way, Tom.

And then Altman and Musk actually have a long personal relationship, correct? What can you tell our viewers about that?

Yeah, listen, the one-time allies weren’t always at odds, but Tom, we’ve seen this time and time again, two people kicking off a startup, seeing common goals and having shared interests, and then all of a sudden splitting ways. We know that the two men were supportive of one another for several years, and up until recently, Elon Musk left OpenAI back in 2018. He said at the time that it was due to avoid really any potential conflicts of interest with Tesla. But Tom, now we see that there’s potentially more to that story.